Talks

Emmy Noether was a giant of mathematics whose work tied together two fundamental concepts: conservation laws and symmetries in nature. But who was she, and why does her work still have such impact? Mathematician Peter Olver explores Noether’s life and career, and delves into the curious history of her famous theorems. Physicist Ruth Gregory looks at the lasting impact of Noether’s theorem, and how it connects with the Standard Model and Einstein’s general relativity.

Some of the most violent events in the Universe are accompanied by spectacular warpages of space-time that travel to us in the form of gravitational waves. Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity over a century ago, but scientists have not yet detected them directly. Learn about how we search for these tiny space-time ripples and decode the unique information they carry about mysterious events in space as far back in time as the first moments after the Big Bang.

A new quantum age is dawning in which humans will be able to build and control scalable quantum systems with amazing properties and applications. Aside from enabling revolutionary future technologies, quantum information science is providing powerful new tools for attacking deep problems in fundamental physical science. In particular, the recent convergence of quantum information and quantum gravity is sparking exciting progress on some old and very hard questions.

Determining causal relationships is central to scientific understanding. Knowledge of such relations permit us not only to predict how a system will behave naturally, but also how it would behave under different hypothetical circumstances, including those where we exert control over some component. In the context of quantum theory, the problem of figuring out what causes what is particularly vexing. One of the central results in the foundations of quantum theory, Bell's theorem, can be understood as demonstrating that it is impossible to provide a causal explanation of the correlations that arise for entangled quantum systems without resorting to fine-tuning. Impossible, that is, using the standard framework of causal models. A new quantum notion of causal model, however, holds promise for achieving such an explanation. It also has practical applications, allowing one to infer causal relationships from observed correlations in scenarios where classically one could not. Correlation does not imply causation. Except in a quantum world, where sometimes it does.

I will discuss the state of particle physics today and emphasize the implications of the discovered H-boson in high energy physics and cosmology and the connections with the future discovery and precision machines and observatories world-wide.